Ben Godfrey's red card will stand in the Checkatrade Trophy
Shrewsbury Town’s appeal against the decision to award Ben Godfrey a red card against Walsall has been unsuccessful.
Godfrey was sent off in the 75th minute of Tuesday night’s Checkatrade Trophy group game, which Town lost 1-0.
Chief Executive Brian Caldwell, who had help put Town’s case forward, was disappointed with the decision.
“I think we are all really disappointed with that – we’ve taken a bit of a kicking from the FA this week”, Brian told ShrewsWeb.
“When you look at the footage and slow it down to 25% you can see that Ben actually gets the ball first. The opposition player slides to ground very early, Ben gets a touch on the ball, the ball the ricochets back off the Walsall player’s foot and goes out of play.
“I can actually understand from the referees view in live action that the Walsall player got to the ball first and Ben had caught the player, but that’s actually not the case when you slow the footage down.
“We hoped common sense would prevail, but they’ve turned that down and said that they’ve upheld the referee’s decision, but to me it would seem a pretty clear cut case because he got to the ball first and it was actually his other leg that made any contact with the Walsall player.
“They did say yesterday that they would come back to us with the full reasons for why they upheld the decision, but 24-hours later we are still waiting on that. They must be too busy at the FA to give clubs some reasons so that we can understand why they’ve made these decisions.”